Most of you don’t listen to our podcast, but if you did, you would know that we’ll be restarting the podcast-tied “Book Club” again all about the video game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. If you’ve never heard of or participated in a book club, it’s pretty much what it sounds like: We all play a game at sort of the same pace, and every week we discuss in detail that week’s goings on in the game on “Here’s a Podcast”.
You can share your thoughts on the second part of the game using the Google Form below, or feel free to post a comment. Remember, we aren’t looking for general thoughts on the game– we want thoughts about this particular section of the game! Play along with us, or go based on memory, but we like depth because we love games. Hooray!
We’ll select a few of your guys’ thoughts to read on the podcast and help spur further discussion, so leave a name and location if you like.
For this week: From the game’s second temple (the sandy place) up through the acquisition of the Master Sword.
Tell us your thoughts with this easy and handy form!
~Austin
Form Up Studios and Sc0tt Games are bringing out a new “retro-themed single-player puzzle game” for the Wii U eShop next week called Tri-Strip.
Below is a brief overview of the title:
It’s a retro-themed single-player puzzle game, much in the style of 90?s era puzzle games. Score points by arranging rows of triangular tiles into quads. Your score multiplies by however many quads you can create in a single move. Enjoy strategic gameplay at a fast pace in the Arcade mode. Push yourself to the limit in the five Challenge modes. Weep for mercy in the time-based challenges of the Super-Hardcore mode!
Tri-Strip will be available on February 5 for $1.99. Check out a trailer below.
Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda was one of the designers on the original Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire games. That means he created environments and maps that make up the region of Hoenn.
In an interview with Kotaku, Masuda revealed that he was inspired by his childhood summers on the island of Kyushu in making Hoenn.
Masuda said:
“So [Hoenn] was inspired by when I would go and visit my grandparents when I was younger. I grew up in Tokyo, which was obviously a big city, and my grandparents lived in Kyushu, a Japanese island. It was really completely different there. Where I came from we didn’t have clean rivers or a lot of insects or wildlife, but when I visited my grandparents I got to experience that abundance of nature – I’d got out and catch bugs, play in the river, catch fish in the ocean, explore forests.”
“I really wanted to express those childhood memories with the Hoenn region when I first thought about Ruby and Sapphire,” he says. “It’s expressed in how abundant the nature is compared to some of the other settings, and also in the idea of secret bases, which was like making tree-houses or a special fort when I was a kid.”
In kanji, “Hoenn” can be roughly translated to “abundance” and bonds” or “connections” when considering “ho” and “en”. This is something that Masuda spoke about as well.
“One of the original themes was this idea of abundance – not just of nature, but of how warm people are in the country, and people were always so nice to me there. Neighbours would say hello to me on the street. That’s the hidden meaning: the abundant bonds between people and nature.”
